His 2014 book, The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World, is a study of the factual basis for the novella Benito Cereno by Herman Melville.

Eric Hobsbawm called The Last Colonial Massacre a "remarkable and extremely well-written work" that is about more than the dark history of Guatemala and the Cold War in Latin America.

[6]Grandin has published widely on U.S. foreign policy, the Cold War, and Latin American politics in The Nation,[7] The New York Times,[8] Harper's,[9] and the London Review of Books.

[19] Fordlandia was named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times,[21] The New Yorker;[22] NPR;[23] The Boston Globe;[24] San Francisco Chronicle;[25] and the Chicago Tribune.

[26] In 2020, Grandin was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America.